Sen. Joe Lieberman’s (I- CT.) cybersecurity bill - a counterpart of sorts to the House's Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) - is running into plenty of opposition from Democrats in the Senate who say the bill does not do enough to protect the privacy of citizens. Adding to the fact that most Senate Republicans don't like Lieberman’s bill is that several prominent Democrats don't like it either. This is causing some real problems for Lieberman and other supporters of the bill, who are seeing that they don't have the 60 votes they need to get it passed.

Among those coming out against the bill are Sens. Al Franken (D-Mn.), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT.) of Connecticut, and Ron Wyden (D-OR.). Franken, who has pushed for Net Neutrality rules and trailed against several mergers among telecoms in recent years, also supported SOPA.

This time Franken is siding with advocacy and lobbyists groups like the ACLU, Center for Democracy & Technology, FreedomWorks, Americans for Limited Government, EFF, ECA, and more.

In a prepared statement issued to Politico, Franken said: "I have serious concerns about this bill. As written, the legislation moves aside decades of privacy laws to allow companies to freely monitor American citizens’ communications and give their personal information to the federal government — and grants companies near total immunity for doing so."

The aforementioned groups wrote Senators to urge them to oppose the bill in its current form. Interestingly enough, many Republican Senators oppose the bill because they don't see a need for "critical infrastructure" to secure their systems - or at least be forced to secure their systems under the watchful eye of the Federal government.

It is expected that the bill might undergo a number of revisions long before it makes it to the floor of the Senate. One thing we are not hearing about is if lawmakers will allow experts in support and opposition of this bill to testify in some open hearings...

On a related note, the Conservative political news site The Daily Caller reports that most lawmakers are keeping very quiet about the FBI’s push to gain the ability to wiretap social networks by updating the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) of 1994.

Reportedly FBI wants an update to that law that would basically force tech companies such as Google, Facebook, and more to create a "backdoor" into their technology for the purposes of monitoring "persons of interest for national security purposes." The article also briefly mentions the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a U.N. agency supported by 193 member countries, who will host a meeting in Dubai to "renegotiate a telecommunications treaty to bring the Internet under the governance of the United Nations."